Europe’s burgeoning startup culture just got another boost, with the launch of Seedcamp – a project to support Europe’s young entrepreneurs, by giving them funding and contacts. It’s very similar to Silicon Valley’s Y Combinator, the Paul Graham-led investment fund that specializes in early stage startups. We profiled Graham and Y Combinator in December last year.
Seedcamp was created by Saul Klein from Index Ventures and Reshma Sohoni from 3i. The project is being run out of London. To participate in Seedcamp, entrepreneurs have until August 5 to submit an application through the Seedcamp website. The top 20 teams will then be selected and invited to London for “a week of intensive mentoring and networking” with industry experts in fields like HR, law, marketing, product development, etc. At the end of that week (Sept 3-7), the top 5 teams will be announced and theyÄôll receive $50,000 euros in funding and an additional 3 months of mentorship.
As Saul wrote in a post on the Seedcamp blog, “we have no more excuses in Europe not to create big, world-beating businesses”. I also liked Sumon Sadhu’s comment in another post that “geographic separation leads to original insight, lack of group-think and an international outlook.” I couldn’t agree more 🙂 So if you’re in Europe and have an idea for The Next Big Thing in web technology, go check out Seedcamp.
